Design a large-scale Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: September 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Vercel
September 11, 202545
13
4,428 solved
Design a scalable video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Vercel. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Vercel values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Users can upload videos in various formats (MP4, WEBM, etc.).
- Users can stream videos with adaptive bitrate streaming.
- Support for user authentication and au...
Capacity Estimation
- Traffic Estimation:
- Assume each user on average streams 1 hour of video per day.
- If we have 10 million users, that results in 10 million hours of video streamed per day.
- Breaking it ...
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